


When Friends Can't Help

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:36:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22382701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "modern AU, Jack still dies; In which Bunnymund mourns Jack along the lines of this song (youtube.com/watch?v=btHd1zrjkqY)."When friends can’t help, maybe an enemy can. The song has some good lines but I don’t know how well they translated into fic.Bunny is in a bad state after Jack dies. He gets help from someone he doesn’t expect. Mentions the side pairings you expect from me.
Relationships: E. Aster Bunnymund/Jack Frost
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: JackRabbit Short Fics





	When Friends Can't Help

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 8/31/2015.

He knew he ought to stay away from people right now. He knew he ought to be around people right now. That added up to zero, a big old goose egg. Right, that made sense. Everything was zero now, wasn’t it? Everything but the fact that Jack was dead. Drowned! What the fuck, what kind of healthy young man drowned in a pond? At least he hadn’t been in there long before he got dragged out, no need for a closed casket, looks just like he was asleep, looks just like—Bunny held his breath. _What does drowning feel like?_ he thought. _Does it feel like this?_  
  
The results were unclear. The ringing of his phone startled him into breathing again. He glared at it. The noise needed to stop, for one thing, but he would also have to move to reach it, and why hadn’t he just turned the ringer off? It was his habit anyway and—Tooth. It had to have been Tooth. When she had left a big dish of curry in his fridge she had also tampered with his phone, the traitor. North’s “I-know-better” attitude was getting to her. She had probably changed the voicemail so it would beep at him until he listened, too. What the fuck did she think—yeah he had been kind of—sure it wasn’t normal but young guys drowning wasn’t normal either—  
  
The sensation of cold blue lips against his own blotted out everything else. With a weird sense of relief he noted that the phone had stopped ringing.  
  
It hadn’t, though. Bunny didn’t want to call his mind back to the blue lips on purpose, so he was once again forced to hear the harsh jangle of an antique phone joined with a modern buzz coming from his kitchen table.  
  
He swore under his breath, then heaved himself up off the couch. His back hurt—he must have been sitting there for longer than he thought.  
  
He gritted his teeth before he looked at the phone. It had better not be someone who would call him “Bunny”, he wouldn’t put up with that, not now, Jack had called him Bunny, Jack—  
  
He had a lot of missed calls. Obviously someone had been just calling and calling and calling—or…no. These calls were at least one hour apart. What had been going on in his mind that he hadn’t noticed the breaks? He uneasily looked to see who was calling now, just to distract himself. It was an Oregon area code, with no contact name, and that meant it could only be one person.  
  
Well. At least he probably wouldn’t be calling out of pity.  
  
“Hey,” he said.  
  
“Edmund,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “I’m astonished. Touched, really. Unless you’re simply avoiding all your contacts and still haven’t added my name…”  
  
“I haven’t. But I knew it was you. You’re the only asshole from Oregon I know.”  
  
Pitch hummed. “Well, then, I’ll let Sandy and the others know. You’re still alive, you still hate me, and yet you’re in a state where you will answer my calls.”  
  
“Still alive? Why wouldn’t I be alive? What’s everyone thinking? The funeral was only yesterday, can’t I have some time in peace?”  
  
“Check your phone calendar,” Pitch snapped.  
  
Bunny muttered angrily under his breath, but did so. Oh. Three days had passed. That would explain why he had been able to sleep long enough to dream of Jack floating away into a blue, blue sky, his hair fluttering in wind, not water…  
  
“So I was wrong about the date. I’m…” He’s not _fine_ , so he can’t really say it, but if he just hangs up Pitch _will_ tell Sandy and Sandy _will_ worry and then North and Tooth will worry and then Katherine and Nightlight will worry internationally and…He groaned.  
  
“It’s terrible how difficult it is to raise one’s eyebrows over the phone,” Pitch said dryly. “Do you have any food in your house?”  
  
“Tooth left a big thing of curry.”  
  
“Did you eat any of it?”  
  
Pitch sounded like he didn’t really care, so Bunny went to go check. As it turned out, he hadn’t. But he must have eaten something, because he wasn’t hungry.  
  
“No. But I’m not hungry.”  
  
Pitch scoffed. “I know you aren’t.”  
  
“You’re a psychic asshole now? What else are you going to tell me about myself?”  
  
“Just you wait. I’m going to tell you something about myself, first. Did you know that before I started “lurking around your friends like the shadow of death” as you charmingly put it, I had a wife and child? And then there was a car crash and I had a dead wife and child. There was still funeral food in my fridge when I had driven all the way out here, and it’s a good thing Sandy met me at that diner because my cross-country road trip was likely to end in the Atlantic. When you and Jack thought I fucking kidnapped him he was coming with me to help me get rid of a bunch of moldy casseroles and…and some other things.  
  
“And so that’s why at this moment, I am the psychic asshole who’s telling you you’re going to be really bad at taking care of yourself for a while, but you don’t want to call our mutual friends because they’re nice. They’d be great if you wanted to get drunk, or cry, or both. But you want to be angry. You want to tell everyone they don’t understand, and they don’t. You don’t want to have to be nice to anyone if they say the wrong thing. You don’t want to moderate what you’re feeling. But you are, amazingly, civilized enough to not want to inflict that on your friends.”  
  
“What the fuck is your point?”  
  
“The point is that your friends are going to come and help you out if I’m honest about what you told me on this phone call, and you don’t actually want that right now. But we’re not really friends. So I’m used to you being a jerk to me. So I’m going to come over and be the one to make sure you don’t turn feral for the sake of our friends’ feelings.”  
  
Bunny made a noncommittal noise. “You’ve got some cynical motive for this, you have to have.”  
  
“My selfish motive is that I know our friends have already dealt with one asshole in mourning and I don’t want them to do so again. In particular, it would upset Sandy more than he already is because of Jack’s death—you are not the only one mourning, even if you think you’re the only one even close to mourning enough.”  
  
“You’re just trying to make everyone think you’re a better person,” Bunny said.  
  
“You will benefit in the same way and I will leave it to psychics to condemn my true intentions,” Pitch replied. “I’ll be over before you know it, with more homemade food from everybody. Be glad I wasn’t in charge of that, otherwise you’d be recovering entirely on canned soup. I’ll be over before you notice the passage of time.”  
  
Pitch hung up.  
  
“Fuck,” Bunny muttered. He didn’t want Pitch, of all people, here in his house for who knew how long! He had to clean this place up, clean himself up, to make it look like he was okay, to make it seem like he wasn’t just constantly thinking about…about Jack.  
  
When Pitch arrived, it turned out Bunny had managed to leave the door unlocked and move one of the pictures of Jack that had been at the funeral from the pile on the kitchen table. Pitch had no idea where it was supposed to go, but Bunny was just holding it, now. He shook his head. This was going to be harder than he thought. He microwaved some curry, prepared himself for an angry reaction, and clapped his hands loudly right in front of Bunny’s nose.


End file.
